The Woman in the Story Read online

  SUPERTHEME 2: FEEL GOOD FEMININITY

  Feel Good Femininity is the driving motivation behind films with heroines who want to live life on their terms as empowered women. As a Feel Good Femininity writer, you want your heroine to indulge in all that is relationship-orientated, from sex to marriage to children to multitasking. You probably believe feminism has truly empowered women, and that women are now able to redefine femininity for themselves in every area of their lives: motherhood, image, purchasing power, sexuality, relationships, and work. Sure, men might have it easier, but women have great lives and things are getting better all the time. You might prefer to call yourself postfeminist rather than feminist, which sounds too angry. You probably are deeply fascinated by the emotional journeys of empowered heroines, in particular how contemporary women deal with relationships with men (and sometimes women, in the case of The L Word, the L.A.-based lesbian TV show).

  Your heroine might be looking for love, but she’s doing it with open and curious eyes. She’s nobody’s victim but her own. If a guy hurts her, she generally ends up working out that she was partly to blame. In He’s Just Not That Into You Gigi goes from being a woman who will do anything to get a boyfriend only to realize her low self-esteem is more damaging to her than any male rejection. If your heroine has got issues with men, she will engage in the battle of the sexes with zest while learning her own lessons along the way. She might have emotional wounds, but she will heal them in order to find the right soul mate or to move on happily single. Some of the most famous heroines to emerge out of this value system in recent years are Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda from the TV show Sex and the City, and a growing audience has followed their trials and tribulations as women getting older. Sex and the City: The Movie showed a more serious side to love and the difficulty of true communication.

  You could say that Feel Good Femininity gets a kick out of women obsessing about being women. These films show ultrafeminine, often affluent, worlds where fashion, glamour, shopping, cooking, beauty, and motherhood are pleasurable pastimes that are presented as central to female identity. This is why films infused with the Feel Good Femininity Supertheme get quite a great deal of stick for being too conventional and not going far enough to challenge stereotypical notions of women. Their critics accuse them of being too conventional despite all the vibrators, sex wars, and relationship obsession.

  I believe the widespread appeal of these films for women (and they do well at the box office) is that they can contain a great deal of emotional truth at the same time as they celebrate the more enjoyable aspects of women’s lives. The Holiday is a great example of two women coming to terms with their emotional wounds, which are getting in the way of having good relationships. These stories can laugh at what’s great and what sucks about being a woman in equal measure. They have resolutely happy endings, often with the heroine finding Mr. Right, but most people, men and women, do want to find their soul mate. These stories reflect this shared romantic wish back to the audience.

  Male characters in these films are never out and out bad guys, oppressing the heroine. If they are negative, they reflect the heroine’s own inner problems. Big and Carrie’s relationship in Sex and the City (show and movie) is a great example of a male and female character both healing their respective emotional wounds to be able to love. Very often the story reveals the bad boys are only bad because of their own psychological baggage. Daniel in Bridget Jones’s Diary knows he’s a compulsive womanizer and laughs at his faults, which is all part of his seductive charm.

  Feel Good Femininity films are the female equivalent to the male action-adventure. Call it gender escapism. These films take their rightful place alongside comfort food and shopping binges. When it comes to mainstream movies, many men crave the adrenalin and suspense of heightened masculinity, and women enjoy the emotional satisfaction and fun of heightened femininity. This is a generalization, but the box office figures back it up. Romantic comedies and what I call dramantic comedies (see Chapter 8) abound, Confessions of a Shopaholic, The Holiday, Something’s Gotta Give, Legally Blonde, Baby Mama, the list is endless. Feel Good Femininity also alive and kicking in TV with Desperate Housewives, Gilmore Girls, Mistresses, No Angels, and Weeds to name a few. These films and TV shows can and do take a poke at the establishment. At the end of The Devil Wears Prada Andrea shuns the shallow world of fashion, but it has taught her some valuable lessons. Like it or not, Feel Good Femininity is here to stay!

  SUPERTHEME 3: FIGHTING FEMININITY

  Fighting Femininity is exactly how it sounds: Your heroine has a major problem with the worse sides of sexism and the “patriarchy.” Patriarchy is a seriously unfashionable term (a bit like feminist), but it’s useful to describe the system that a Fighting Femininity heroine meets head on. If you are interested in heroines embarking on “women against the system” journeys, this is the Supertheme for you. As a Fighting Femininity writer, you’re motivated by women, who, despite victimization and oppression, find it within themselves to get up and fight despite the odds. You like writing about heroines who take on the boys and win. Or if they don’t win, and your heroine has a tragic ending, there’s no doubt what is to blame — the patriarchy!

  You’re a writer who knows that power structures have been limiting women’s lives for millennia, and you are motivated to write a story to show it’s still going on. You might not call yourself a feminist, but your narrative gives you away! One thing is for sure, you think there are still changes that need to be made, and you might even believe something of a backlash is going on against feminism. If you had a song as your theme tune, it would be I Will Survive. Even in the domestic sphere, you want to see your heroine breaking out of limiting confines to be free. Nazneen in Brick Lane escapes the dominance of her husband by gaining confidence in making her own decisions and finally emancipating herself and her daughters from his repressive expectations. Heroines like Shirley Valentine (Shirley Valentine) and Thelma and Louise (Thelma and Louise) all share a need to break out of domestic drudgery.

  Sometimes heroines empower themselves, against all odds. Erin Brockovich (Erin Brockovich) is an impoverished and uneducated single mom. She takes on a corporate giant and wins. Through thick-skinned determination and economic desperation, she singlehandedly changes her own life, those of her children, and a community. In Rabbit-Proof Fence, three little ‘half-caste’ aboriginal girls evade institutionalization at the hands of a cruel man in order to search for their natural mothers. If you like to write biopics about women, you have a great range of Fighting Femininity films to inspire you. Historical films, such as The Duchess and The Other Boleyn Girl, show heroines whose lives are crushed by male domination. In The Hours, the pain of being a woman in a highly restrictive world is sensitively explored through interweaving story lines, in which three very different heroines, one of whom is Virginia Woolf, make painful choices in an attempt to live life on their terms. Similarly, Sylvia shows the plight of a sensitive female genius Sylvia Plath when she marries egocentric womanizer Ted Hughes. Her ability to write is compromised by the stress of isolated motherhood and her emotional torment over Ted’s affairs. In Frida, fragile physicality and a roving husband are both obstacles to, and fuel for, Frida Kahlo’s art. Fighting Femininity stories don’t all have to be doom and gloom. Bend It Like Beckham gives a humorous take on traditional Sikh values getting in the way of a teenage female football fanatic’s dreams. An Education tells a true and humorous coming of age story about Jenny whose affair with an older man nearly jeopardizes her chance of going to Oxford. During her story, Jenny tries to make sense of the limited lives of the women around her, leading her to finally make a choice that helps her truly grow.

  Many films with heroines from world cinema reflect Fighting Femininity, reminding us that many women’s lives in different parts of the world are still unequal. In 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in which the heroine Otilia has to support her friend through the harrowing ordeal of an illegal abortion, women�
�s powerlessness and sexual double standards are explored in-depth. Maria Full of Grace shows a young Mexican woman oppressed by a sexist Latino culture where opportunities for women are so grim she would prefer to risk her life and that of her unborn child by becoming a drug mule. The plight of Indian women is brought carefully home by Deepa Metha’s films, Fire, Earth, and Water. Curse of the Golden Flower follows an Empress in dynastic China trying to escape the emotional and physical tyranny of her husband, who finally accepts that her husband’s power is unbeatable and she will only find freedom through death. Contemporary French cinema is on a roll in making films influenced by Fighting Femininity, but with a dark twist. The work of Catherine Breillat (Romance, A Ma Soeur!, and The Last Mistress) gives us heroines who have no bounds exploring their feminine fantasies.

  Men in these films tend to reflect sexism and misogyny on either personal or cultural levels. They can be cruel control freaks or powerless good guys. Sometimes the heroine has to challenge a woman or group of women who are upholders of a sexist system. The heroines of Mona Lisa Smile and The Devil Wears Prada all take on a dominating woman or women who represent backward attitudes toward women. In Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2, “The Bride” empowers herself to exact deadly revenge against both her male and female persecutors.

  Even comedies reveal the Fighting Femininity Supertheme, such as St. Trinian’s, in which the anarchic femininity of school girls rules the day as they take on the government inspectors to save their school. The Stepford Wives and Down with Love also critique the damaging restrictions of gender roles by using parody.

  SUPERTHEME 4: FUTURE FEMININITY

  The Supertheme of Future Femininity fuels the motivation of writers who want to write a good story in which the hero just happens to be a woman. You are a Future Femininity writer if you really want to avoid explorations of femininity. You aspire to write stories that reflect true equality in a world where gender Conflicts have been solved, and women don’t feel the need to reclaim femininity, obsess over it, or fight it. It’s not that you’re uncomfortable with it, you simply want to write a story with a strong female character. You feel the future is here already, and you don’t want to get bogged down in agonizing about gender issues. You might even identify with the approach of a male director who told me (on writing female characters) “I write them as men and then given them female names.” With Future Femininity, your take on femininity is as a by-product of your story and not a driving concern that motivates you. Future Femininity is a vulnerable Super-theme because when you have a heroine, it can be difficult to avoid “being a woman” issues as they take over and infuse the story. It can happen intuitively, as you rewrite draft after draft, or because others in the development process want you to make your story more about women’s issues or your heroine’s sense of femininity.

  Rendition is a good example of Future Femininity. Reese With-erspoon’s main problem is to find out the truth about her husband and to get him home safely. The fact that she’s a mother is not the main issue. Nor is she feeling oppressed because of her gender, because it is the decisions of a powerful woman that have led to her husband’s incarceration. She’s angry because her husband has gone and everyone is lying! The Coen brothers’ movies tend to reflect Future Femininity, not by ignoring gender roles, but by revealing the dark and ugly sides of masculinity and femininity that men and women use to their advantage to gain power over one another. Burn After Reading and Intolerable Cruelty reveal this cynical take on gender.

  When you are motivated by Future Femininity you can make a conscious decision to subvert gender roles, so that traditional expectations of male and female characters are minimized. Male characters can be nurturing and empathetic without anyone making a big deal out of it. Female characters might have a great deal of power over men in the story. All of this is coincidental. A heroine might be the breadwinner, with a supportive male partner, and it just isn’t an issue.

  As you probably guessed, sci-fi and utopian films are great contenders to write with the Future Femininity Supertheme. By removing the female character from the reality of the world as we know it, you can automatically liberate her characterization from real-world expectations. Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a good example of a woman not beset by gender concerns, who leads a team with nice guys. Star Trek, The Matrix, and Avatar all give us female characters (not heroines, mind you) who have an external problem that is paramount to the plot, and any questions or issues about femininity are secondary.

  Television is full of shows with Future Femininity at work, particularly in thriller and crime stories. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Prime Suspect, and Damages are shows in which the heroine has a clearly external problem and being a woman is not the main deal. With investigative thrillers, these heroines are focused on solving crime. You can keep the gender exploration in the background, although it will still come through. For instance, Prime Suspect has a distinctly Fighting Femininity undercurrent.

  You can use biopic as a good genre for Future Femininity films if your heroine’s life is defined by a passion. For instance, Silkwood and Gorillas in the Mist are good examples of women with driving passions in their careers, and in which the external problem and goal are not overshadowed by questions or explorations about femininity. Likewise, La Vie en Rose is a brilliant example of character-driven study of Edith Piaf that follows her rise as a singer and her battle with self-destructive addictions because of the poverty and emotional abuse in her childhood. Singing is Edith’s survival strategy and source of life. It is true that all these films reflect Fighting Femininity to a certain extent, as these heroines get where they want to be by snubbing conventional expectations to pursue their dreams. By focusing on what your heroine is actually passionate about, your story can dilute the impact of the other Superthemes.

  So these are the four main Superthemes. There is actually a fifth, Fantasy Femininity, but it’s one where memorable heroines do not thrive, in fact it produces the opposite: unmemorable stereotypes of women. Fantasy Femininity is behind the films and genres in which female characterization remains two dimensional. Slasher, horror, and action films are the main perpetuators. The audience tends to be young and male. This isn’t to say that some writers try to subvert the stereotypes in certain genres (think Jennifer’s Body and the more recent James Bond films like Quantum of Solace), but escaping the fantasy element is difficult. Why fantasy? Because the characters are either idealized male fantasies of femininity or projections of misogyny, and most women just can’t relate to them. Women are young and beautiful, either victims or betrayers, and exist to be saved or brutalized by men.

  EXERCISE: SCREENWRITER’S SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONNAIRE

  Okay, now it’s time to think about you, the writer. Have a go at filling in the Self-Assessment Questionnaire, the first of many that appear throughout this book. Most of them are going to be addressed to your heroine, but sometimes they’ll be addressed to you.

  Even if you do not have a writing project at the moment, still try to complete it. It’s amazing what you can find out about yourself when you give yourself the time. You might even get an idea for a new heroine’s story!

  SCREENWRITER’S SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONNAIRE

  1. Why do you want to write this story?

  2. Which audience is your story aimed at?

  3. If you could choose five adjectives to describe the situation of women in your culture, what would they be?

  4. What are your five favorite films with heroines? Why?

  5. Do any of the Feminine Superthemes feel more relevant to the female-led films being produced in your own culture?

  6. If any film with a heroine particularly annoys you, can you say why?

  7. If you have a project started, do you think any of the Super-themes are influencing you? How?

  8. If the story you want to write could be described as a cross between two known films or shows, what are they?

  THE

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  Chapter 2

  Now that you’ve worked out which of the Feminine Superthemes could be motivating your desire to create a heroine, it is time to think about who she is going to be. Why her? What’s so special about her? Why does she appeal to you? How is she going to appeal to your audience?

  There is a good chance that you may already know who your heroine is. She might be based on a true-life story and a thinly disguised version of you! She might be someone completely fictional, invented by your originality. Alternatively, she might be a fusion of all these things, influenced by who you are, the women you know, other screen heroines, and your own wild imagination.

  Whoever she is, your aim is to create a heroine who will launch thousands of viewers to their screens and will keep them there, gripped and entertained. They want to see a memorable character telling a story that might be true to life, but that is portrayed in a unique way.

  CHARACTER VERSUS STORY

  If a fantastic story idea or a high concept is your driving inspiration, then you will be creating a heroine to lead that particular idea afterward. It is inevitable that her characterization will be “story” or “plot” led. What do I mean by this?

  Well, a high-concept pitch is one sentence that sets up the central problem or situation of a character and gives it an ironic twist. Most high-concept heroine-led films tend to come out of the U.S. and can be comedies, romantic comedies, thrillers, or supernatural films; all the solid genre fare. Comedies, ranging from Overboard, Bringing Up Baby, and Roman Holiday to the more recent Bride Wars, Legally Blonde, What Happens in Vegas, Just Married, and The Proposal, all promote certain predictability in the main problem of the central character, which you can sum up in a one-line pitch. In a comedy, we know the heroine or heroines are usually going to resolve their problems, we just want to watch how they pull it off. We also want to see a memorable heroine who makes the inevitable fun to watch. If it’s Sandra Bullock serving up a tried-and-tested romantic comedy formula by doing a goddess dance around a fire, then fabulous! We know where we stand.